We are having an open remix opportunity for jazzsequence‘s Wasp album. Your submission could be featured on an upcoming EP or remix collection on Plague Music or a compilation on Shinto Records.

Here’s the skinny

Submissions can be in any genre and in any format

All the included stems and clips can be used, or none, it’s up to you! Want to write a completely original track based on the album? Go for it!

Using your own instruments/beats/loops/samples is welcome, however any samples you use must be royalty-free or you must have acquired the rights to use said sample.

You may submit as many completed tracks as you like.

Send us a link to your track via our contact form or drop your submissions in our Soundcloud Dropbox.

Please get your submissions in by September 1, 2011. If you’re interested in participating but can’t make the deadline, let us know — me may be willing to give you a couple days to finish your track.

Additional information

Wasp was written as a soundtrack to the novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. While it’s not mandatory that you be familiar with the book, it might help to give some backstory to the tracks. Wasp was composed using the concept of leitmotifs, using recurring themes and melodies to reflect different characters. When two characters in the novel share experiences together, their leitmotifs play against each other in the music. Rather than focusing on Mikael Blomkvist and the Millenium publishing group, Wasp, instead tries to interpret the events more from the perspective of Lisbeth, whom the album is named for.

Ableton users can use the original clip files. For everyone else, the zip files include the full stems as well as midi files.

Track notes & downloads

Hedestad
This piece introduces the setting. The bulk of the novel takes place here as well as the mystery that the main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander set out to uncover. This track serves to introduce the mood and setting of the rest of the album.

Incentive
This song takes place when Mikael accepts the job to investigate the mystery of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. The guitar parts introduced in this track serve as Blomkvist’s leitmotifs while the string parts are the leitmotifs for Harriet Vanger.

– The initial sexual assault
– systematic brutality
I AM A
SADISTIC PIG
A PERVERT
AND A
RAPIST
This song has three parts, representing the two times Lisbeth is sexually assaulted by her guardian, Nils Bjurman and concluding with her revenge. Bjurman’s leitmotifs are the heavy metal guitar parts, which transform into ambient synth parts at the end when he is being tattoed by Lisbeth. The distorted squealing instrument (bjurman 17-Ambient-Filter Stutter) represents the sound of the tattoo needle digging into Bjurman’s skin. On the album, the third part is isolated as a separate, bonus track.

Magda — 32016
Sara — 32109
R.J. — 30112
R.L. — 32027
Mari — 32018
This song takes place as Blomkvist is deeply involved in the research surrounding Harriet’s disappearance and the mysterious code he finds in her diary.

Pigeon in a flowerpot (five plus three)
This song represents the a ha! moment when Lisbeth discovers the secret of the names in the diary, and finds more victims whose names did not appear in Harriet’s diary. This track features modified versions of Lisbeth and Blomkvist’s leitmotifs as they are doing research as well as instruments and melodies representing the deaths of the victims.

Opening the door to hell
Mikael and Lisbeth, separately, uncover the murderer, but not before he finds Blomkvist and forces him into the underground cell designed for torturing and murdering his victims.

I have an account on Indaba Music, which is sort of a social network for musicians, but — like many similar sites out there — they host remix contests to potentially get your music (or remix) on an actual album (for actual money). A while back they hosted a remix contest for Daft Punk’s soundtrack from Tron, but I was too slow and anyway, most of the really good opportunities cost money to enter (not generally a lot, but still…). I also missed a Steve Reich remix contest I didn’t even know there was, but they announced the winners. I was bummed about that.

They announced a remix contest for a New York Polyphony disc of Gregorian chants and I thought “hey, if Delirium can take Gregorian chant and make awesome music, I can at least give it a try, right?” There were three available tracks, but because I only had two “keys” (and each remix required one “key”) — and didn’t really want to get more right now — I had to be selective. I picked “Victimae Paschali Laudes” because, of the three options, it had the most different stuff going on in the melodies and it seemed to have a bit of a higher tempo. Still, all that goes out the window because when you’re playing with music like this, there isn’t necessarily a steady rhythm throughout…there’s often rests that are longer or shorter depending on the conductor which makes turning something like this into an electronic piece — which is entirely rhythmic — a bit more challenging.

I started out by creating a modified phase pattern. Phase patters were most used by Steve Reich when he was playing with reel to reel tapes, and was looping two copies of the same recording and realized they were slightly out of sync because one of the tapes was somewhat shorter than the other. Rather than calling it bad, he proceeded to use that theory in almost every piece of music he’s written since, creating music that goes in and out of sync with itself. I’ve played with phase patters quite a bit in the past, and though I haven’t much with them recently, I thought that the breaks in the verses and the way some verses were longer than others would adapt well to phase patterns and be fairly interesting, possibly creating a sort of chorale effect. I took the first verse and looped it a bunch of times, then I cut off a few seconds of the end and looped that three times. Then I inserted the second verse. Looped the first (cut) verse three more times and added the third verse. Repeat until I’ve worked through all the verses. Then I mixed the two finished pieces — which were about the same length, and dropped it in my track. Then I duplicated that, added a vocoder effect that Alvin Lucier would be proud of (because it completely removes any semblance of the original speech), and ran that through my Glitch VST and added a delay effect. I used that to create the backdrop of the piece.

The rest of the track is an electronica piece hovering somewhere between ambient and dance with a steady beat that’s just slow enough to make people walk off the dance floor. (That’s okay, because I wasn’t trying to make something you could dance to, and anyway, dancing to Gregorian chant is sacrilegious or something, right?) I took the first and second verse and made a sort of verse-chorus-verse song structure out of it, and added the last verse — which slows down at the end — and used it to close the song. Most of the instruments are things that I built for the track — or at least heavily modified — and, as a last-minute addition, I took a snippet of the vocals and looped it, creating an instrument out of that which harmonizes with the lead synth (I didn’t want it to be entirely electronic).

After watching the demo video of the Glitch VST, I realized how woefully little I really take advantage of all the possibilities, so decided to go back and play with the effects live, so make that particular track a bit more variable than it already was.

Anyway, here’s my remix of a Gregorian chant. The lyrics are about the resurrection and have a lot of the sort of conflicting phrases you see in Catholic liturgy like “he who is dead but is alive” which, you know, reading from a no-longer-in-the-Catholic-church perspective, just sounds bizarre. The first verse — from which the title comes and the one I sample the most — translates to “Christians, to the Paschal victim offer your thankful praises!” — which also sounds a bit bizarre and morbid. (If we weren’t talking about, you know, the son of God, at what point would we offer thankful praises to a victim?) At any rate, I named my remix “resurrection glitch” as a nod to the subject matter. If you have a minute, vote for my submission.

I’ve been meaning to make a s3quence mix that had stuff from #RPM2011, but I was waiting until I had a chance to listen to more of the stuff that came out of it. Then the earthquake/tsunami in Japan happened. Looking at these pictures is mind-blowing, as is the constant threat of nuclear radiation for those in the surrounding area. Often, when faced with something of such astounding scale, you just freeze up — you have no idea what you can do. BassLove4Japan was created to organize DJs and musicians to help provide relief for those affected in Japan through a nonprofit organization Music For Relief. BassLove4Japan encourages DJs and musicians to use their following to text donations to Japan (text ‘MFR’ to 85944 to make a $10 donation) and contribute by submitting tracks or proceeds from shows or whatever they can do to help spread the word. Times are tight, but I wanted to do something, so I’ve donated a couple hours of my time to create this mix, at the end of which is a bit of a public service announcement with information about how to help. Even if you can’t make the donation yourself, please spread this mix as far and wide as possible, to as many people as will listen, and tell them to donate to help aid those whose homes and livelihoods have been completely devastated.